Published 4:00 am, Sunday, June 8, 2003

When confronted with great heights there are no limits to our imaginations. The sometimes precious, usually narcissistic reasons we attach to scaling mountains -- spirituality, masculinity, cleansing -- begin in our minds. For ultimately mountains are neutral creations of geology, of shifting and colliding tectonic plates with no regard, for example, for the male musings of Victorian Europeans.

Yet, as author Robert Macfarlane writes in "Mountains of the Mind," the colonial mind knew no limits, or more accurately, no boundaries. In 1899, the forgettable Viceroy of India Lord Curzon "gazed up at the white ramparts of the Himalaya from the windows of his cool and shadowed palace at Simla. Everest enchanted him. 'As I sat daily in my room,' he wrote, 'and saw that range of snowy battlements uplifted against the sky, that huge palisade shutting off India from the rest of the world, I felt it should be the business of Englishmen, if of anybody, to reach the summit.' "

The native peoples that lived in the shadow of Everest, named by the British for surveyor George Everest, thought the Brits' idea of climbing the mountain was "somewhere between downright lunacy and outright blasphemy." Sherpas, the region's human pack animals for "Everesters" past and present, do not even have a word for the top of a mountain, but they do, Macfarlane points out, have words for "flank" and "pass." As for Everest itself, Nepalis and Tibetans, certainly not limited by their own imaginary worlds, speak

of Chomolungma and Sagarmatha, respectively, referring to various goddesses of the world and sky.

Latest entertainment videos

You Need To See The Romantic Place Where Prince Harry & Meghan Markle Fell In LoveTownAndCountry

A Countdown to the 13 Most Expensive Celebrity Dresses of All TimeELLEDecor

In Honor of Taylor Swift’s Birthday We’re Showcasing Her Best Moments of 2017!MarieClaire

Selena Gomez And Justin Bieber Won’t Be Spending Christmas Together And More NewsMarieClaire

Hair Diary with Celebrity Stylist Kristen EssHarpersBazaar

Meghan Markle Has Always Used Her Voice For Advocacy And CharityMarieClaire

The 7 Most Romantic Celebrity ProposalsMarieClaire

A Reporter Asked Justin Bieber If He Plans To Propose To Selena Gomez Soon And The Singer Broke Into The Biggest Grin And More NewsMarieClaire

Nicki Minaj Can Literally Drop Jaws In Any OutfitMarieClaire

Colonialism is just one of many impulses we have leavened into our alpine exploits. Macfarlane, who continues his family's tradition of climbing, has assembled a convincing book of historical evidence alongside his own oxygen- deprived experiences in an attempt to answer the age-old question, "Why climb the mountain?" The glib answer, "Because it's there," hardly begins to address the curious confluence of science and fancy that continues to tempt, and routinely kill and maim, multitudes of climbers on their insatiable need to gaze down upon the rest of us flatlanders from their lofty perches.

"What we call a mountain," Macfarlane writes, "is thus in fact a collaboration of the physical forms of the world with the imagination of humans -- a mountain of the mind. And the way people behave toward mountains has little or nothing to do with the actual objects of rock and ice themselves. "

Still, all that rock and ice above timberline is the very reason that Europeans turned their gazes skyward.

Nineteenth century Scottish lawyer-turned-geologist Charles Lyell began Europeans' transformation of looking at mountains as gateways to the past. Lyell's 1830s' three-volume opus "The Principles of Geology: an Attempt to Explain the Former Changes of the Earth's Surface by Reference to Causes Now in Operation" became an invitation to strap on a pair of boots and get intimate with ancient earth. The book with the awkward title was a big hit. Eleven editions were published by 1872.

Soon, a "fossil craze" emerged with weekend warriors literally hitting the slopes with pick and ax "to browse the archives of the earth." Professor William Turl of Green Street advertised to "give individual instruction for tourists so they can acquire sufficient knowledge to identify all the ordinary components of the crystalline and volcanic rocks . . . in the European mountains." To be among the elite was to have a special room full of pillaged relics over which Victorians could "contemplate the ineffable age of the earth. "

But peril more so than knowledge has been a key element of mountain worship.

Dangers have always seemed to excite instead of repel climbers. John Ruskin in 1863 suggested that if you did not risk your life you are "weaker, more lifeless, more effeminate, more liable to passion and error in the future." Following a near-death experience of his own in the Alps, Macfarlane remarks "how much pleasure the fear had brought afterwards . . . how strange it is to risk yourself for a mountain, but how central to the experience is that risk and the fear it brings with it."

Now Playing:

The last chapter of "Mountains of the Mind" is the story of George Mallory's three unsuccessful attempts to summit Everest in the 1920s. Mallory embodies most of the best and worst characteristics of a mountaineer. Three young children, a devoted wife and a secure career as schoolmaster were not enough to keep the thirtysomething Mallory at home. Macfarlane's account of Mallory's trips are mostly cobbled from earlier books and Mallory's own letters to his wife, Ruth, but it serves as a beautiful nexus, capturing the blind compulsion of a climber and the "emotional traditions which he inherited and cultivated, and which made him so susceptible to possession by Everest." For the third attempt was not a charm. Mallory died in 1924 at an altitude of 27,000 feet.

In an obituary that typified the attitudes of the times, Mallory and his companion Sandy Irvine were praised for "the fineness of their deaths . . . they themselves could hardly have chosen a better end." Mallory's body was eventually found in 1999, "his arms flung up and out as though he had halted himself as he slid by digging his nails into the rock."

Latest from the SFGATE homepage:

Click below for the top news from around the Bay Area and beyond. Sign up for our newsletters to be the first to learn about breaking news and more. Go to 'Sign In' and 'Manage Profile' at the top of the page.